Sarah Henstra is a professor of English at Ryerson University. She is the author of the young adult novel Mad Miss Mimic, which was published by Penguin Canada. The Red Word is her first work of adult fiction. She lives in Toronto.

About the Book

A smart, dark, and take-no-prisoners look at rape culture and the extremes to which ideology can go, The Red Word is a campus novel like no other. As her sophomore year begins, Karen enters into the back-to-school revelry—particularly at a fraternity called GBC. When she wakes up one morning on the lawn of Raghurst, a house of radical feminists, she gets a crash course in the state of feminist activism on campus. GBC is notorious, she learns, nicknamed “Gang Bang Central” and a prominent contributor to a list of date rapists compiled by female students. Despite continuing to party there and dating one of the brothers, Karen is equally seduced by the intellectual stimulation and indomitable spirit of the Raghurst women, who surprise her by wanting her as a housemate and recruiting her into the upper-level class of a charismatic feminist mythology scholar they all adore. As Karen finds herself caught between two increasingly polarized camps, ringleader housemate Dyann believes she has hit on the perfect way to expose and bring down the fraternity as a symbol of rape culture—but the war between the houses will exact a terrible price.

The Red Word captures beautifully the feverish binarism of campus politics and the headlong rush of youth toward new friends, lovers, and life-altering ideas. With strains of Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot, Alison Lurie’s Truth and Consequences, and Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons, Sarah Henstra’s debut adult novel arrives on the wings of furies.

Praise

Named One of the Best New Books of the Month by Harper’s Bazaar, Popsugar, Bitch, Fast Company, and Read It Forward

“Sarah Henstra’s The Red Word will get you fuming, laughing, cheering, and most of all, thinking.”—Cosmopolitan

“The Red Word is the smartest, most provocative novel I’ve read in a long time. Sarah Henstra dives headlong into some murky, turbulent waters—gender politics, campus sexual assault, complicity, moral responsibility—and emerges with a book that’s as shocking as it is essential.” —Tom Perrotta, author of The Leftovers

“A timely, telling look at rape culture on campus, Sarah Henstra’s The Red Word boldly goes to the places where memoir can’t but fiction can—and gives way to one hell of a realistic narrative.” —Popsugar

“Timely and incisive, young adult author Sarah Henstra makes her adult fiction debut with this tale of collegiate politics and campus rape. Infused with Homerian weight, the novel is appropriately Greek-focused, centering on a controversy between bad boy fraternity house Gamma Beta Chi, the radical feminists of Raghurst, and a young woman caught between the two when a set-up to call out the fraternity’s rape culture leads to unintended tragedy.”—Harper’s Bazaar, “14 Books You Should Read This March”

“The Red Word is set in the 1990s but speaks directly to the present feminist moment. Sarah Henstra takes us into two worlds: that of Women’s Studies classes and lesbian pagan rituals, and of frat boys and S&M theme parties. As I watched Karen struggle with politics, power, and her own culpability in the fallout of it all, I could not put this book down.” —Darcey Steinke, author of Suicide Blonde and Sister Golden Hair

“Set in the 1990s, The Red Word interrogates the prevailing political preoccupations of that time: gender politics, third-wave feminism, and consent . . . A timely and nuanced dissection of rape culture.” —Booklist

“Few authors are more qualified to write about university life than Sarah Henstra, a Ryerson English prof by day and novelist by night. In The Red Word. . . Henstra cleverly navigates thorny issues like sexual assault, militant ideology, and the polarization between belligerent college kids and ultra-progressive campus activists.” —Toronto Life

“The Red Word examines rape culture on college campuses with a precision and gentleness that few novels have achieved. . . While The Red Word is entertaining, it’s also a sobering reminder of the horrors inflicted on women, trans, and nonbinary people on college campuses.” —Bitch

Excerpt

I squinted up at a shadow blocking out the sun. A man was standing over me. He wore faded jeans and a huge oval belt buckle etched with a triple X. I lifted my elbow to my brow and the man became a woman, a girl my age. If I’d learned anything last year at college, I’d learned that just because someone was wearing a military crew cut and a white T-shirt tight across her flat chest and had a pack of cigarettes folded into the sleeve of the T-shirt like James Dean, it didn’t mean you went and assumed she was male. Some of my education seemed to have worn off over the summer.

“Are you okay?” the girl asked.

I turned my cheek to the grass in an effort to mute the stereophonic whine of cicadas and grasshoppers. I was lying in somebody’s backyard. Gray fencing teetered overhead, but the only shade on me fell from the massive, hairy leaves of some kind of vine I was curled beside. “What is this plant?” I said.

“Um, pumpkin,” the girl said. “Look, are you okay? What happened to you?” she said.

“I had sex with somebody,” I said. The uprush of memory, and the shock that I’d spoken it aloud, made me retch a little. I rolled over and sat up in the grass.